Towards WCET Analysis of Multicore Architectures Using UPPAAL

Abstract

To take full advantage of the increasingly used shared-memory multicore architectures, software algorithms will need to be parallelized over multiple threads. This means that threads will have to share resources (e.g. some level of cache) and communicate and synchronize with each other. There already exist software libraries (e.g. OpenMP) used to explicitly parallelize available sequential C/C++ and Fortran code, which means that parallel code could be easily obtained.
To be able to use parallel software running on multicore architectures in embedded systems with hard real-time constraints, new WCET (Worst-Case Execution Time) analysis methods and tools must be developed. This paper investigates a method based on model-checking a system of timed automata using the UPPAAL tool box. It is found that it is possible to perform WCET analysis on (small) parallel systems using UPPAAL. We also show how to model thread synchronization using spinlock-like primitives.